How to Reduce Lag
For those new to online gaming, you may be confused as to why the game seems to lag behind and then catch up with itself during play or just seem to run slowly and haltingly. In the online gaming community this is commonly known as lag. It can have numerous causes from a variety of sources and a number of adverse effects on gameplay. Effects You may notice such things as: *Breaking a block and items falling from it several seconds later *Broken blocks reappearing for a moment or permanently *Players or mobs appearing to stall and then move too fast in the direction they were travelling *Stuttering or freezing of the graphics causing slow movement *Being teleported back to a previous location after travelling for a short time *A delay after right-clicking on a chest or furnace before it opens the inventory *Sending a message in chat takes several seconds to appear on-screen Causes In general, there are 3 main sources of lag on a server: Busy Server When a server gets too busy, it can use up all of its RAM and CPU. This causes the server to slow down its responses to players, things happening on the server, and saving and loading to the world files as it struggles to free more memory and waits for the CPU to become available. We have taken a number of measures to prevent this: *All of our plugins were created with efficiency in mind. None of them will recklessly waste resources and tie up memory or the processor. *We use the NoLagg plugin which makes efficiency improvements to the standard Minecraft server and reduces common causes of server lag *We use a system of dynamically changing the number of available player slots to always keep the server running at peak effiency. It will prevent more players from joining than it can cope with at the time. Anyone can check on server lag at any time by typing /lag. This should report that the server is running at or close to 100% of standard tick rate at all times. If it is consistently lower or higher than 100%, you should report the issue to an admin so that we can recalibrate the server. Bad Connection In order for information to travel between your computer and our servers it may need to travel a great distance. The Wrath of Kythrian server is based in Dallas, Texas, USA, and for someone connecting elsewhere in the world or even other places in the US, there are a number of checkpoints you need to get through in order to reach us. First your ISP, then to a DNS, and out onto a major trunkline or satellite. There could be several hops before you get into the region where the server is location, and then you go through our local DNS, and then to the server farm where our server is located. This is typical for connecting to any online server. Information can get held up or lost along the way, and when that information is you telling the server that you broke a block or opened a chest or sent a chat message, those actions cannot be processed until the server actually receives them. You can take some measures to help alleviate this kind of lag, although much of it is out of both of our hands: *Avoid heavy internet use while you play the game, anything that requires a high bit-rate will eat up your bandwidth and stop Minecraft getting a look in: **File downloads or uploads, torrents **Live-streaming music or video **Voice or video chat *Use a fast and reliable Internet Service Provider. Many ISPs oversell their services and so at busy times you will be competing with other customers for the same bandwidth. *Reboot your router/modem and computer. Sometimes they get clogged up or use a connection that has issues somewhere along the line. Resetting it will clear it out and force it to create a new connection. To make sure you are getting what you pay for you can use one of many online broadband speed testing services. For your convenience, here is a link to a popular one: http://www.speedtest.net/ It is best to shut down anything that uses your internet connection before performing a test. If your speeds are consistently lower than promised you should discuss this with your ISP. You have the right to receive the bandwidth you are paying for. Download speeds from 10-20 Mbps are good, and uploads from 1-2 Mbps. You can also test your internet speed against other servers around the world. You can try testing against servers in Dallas, Texas, as this is where our servers are located, and this should give you some idea about potential hold-ups in the trans-continental trunklines that connect the internet together. Unfortunately if these speeds are a lot lower than your local ones, there is nothing either of us can do about it. This is just the nature of the internet, at busy times of day it is worse, and there is always the possibility of hardware faults anywhere along the line. Slow Computer Even if your computer is up to spec for playing Minecraft, it might not be performing anywhere near at peak efficiency. If your computer is running slow, whether you're playing single-player or multiplayer, you're going to have gameplay issues. Here are some of the most common causes of lag caused by your computer: *Running too many programs at once. If there are several other programs running that use up all of your CPU and memory, minecraft is going to run slower. Even a super-computer will run slow if you try to do more on it than it can handle. Close down programs you are not using before you play *Minecraft. It is just slow and inefficient, and cannot even take advantage of multi-core processors. It is strongly recommended that you use the Optifine mod for Minecraft that greatly increases efficiency and allows multi-threading. This will even help make servers run more efficiently as an optifine-modded client is more intelligent about data sent and requested from servers. *Using up too much disk space. Keep at least one quarter of your disk drives free at all times so that you can regularly defragment the drives. As files are added and removed from your disk, gaps are left where files are removed. Big files cannot fit where small files used to be, and sometimes they have to be broken into pieces, or fragmented, in order to fit. This slows things down trying to retrieve them later. Its not just Minecraft which needs to save data during play, but also the operating system. Windows need a large amount of free space for its page-filing system which is needed for memory management, and other services need to read and write from disk too. *You got viruses. Viruses and malware can often slow down your computer, especially keyloggers attempting to steal your passwords and credit card info, and spyware tracking your activity for marketing or criminal purposes. They can also use up your bandwidth trying to spread themselves or used as a platform for hackers trying to attack websites. You should obtain a good and most importantly trustworthy anti-virus program. Many viruses like to pose as anti-viral software to catch out the unwary, so always buy from a respected retailer. *Its getting old. Computers generally get slower over time. If your computer is over 5 years old, components may be wearing out, or just antiquated and don't work well with modern software. Operating systems, particularly windows, can get pretty choked up over that time, so its a good idea to reinstall operating systems every year or two, replace or upgrade components as needed, or just buy a newer computer. Category:Guides